[sbmassey]

How would you expect it to handle high and low volume blogs together "meaningfully"? I guess I'm not really sure what the problem is: it's pretty easy to put all your high volume stuff into a single category so you can mark everything read at once, if that is the issue.

[stcredzero]

> How would you expect it to handle high and low volume blogs together "meaningfully"?

An app that would let me dump all high volume blogs and Twitter into the same bucket would be awesome!

I guess a unified service that usefully filtered low S/N ratio feeds of all kinds would be awesome.

[vilhelm_s]

>An app that would let me dump all high volume blogs and Twitter into the same bucket would be awesome!

That's what google reader did for me, I subscribe to twitter feeds through RSS, label them (and other high-volue blogs) with a tag "noise", so I can easily mark them all as read.

Of course, Twitter is trying to kill RSS too, subscribing to new feeds doesn't seem to work.

[stcredzero]

> Of course, Twitter is trying to kill RSS too, subscribing to new feeds doesn't seem to work.

What about a cloud-based app that kept synced across your devices? I wonder if it would be possible to create a client that would let you quickly read Twitter, app.net and feed content, and filter the latter two? (So long as you stay below the 100,000 user mark?)

[crucialfelix]

its a problem I've thought about too. its a big problem on twitter.

some people post rarely, and they often have very high quality well thought out posts. others are media outlets or blabber mouths.

you can balance them by presenting a feed of what is new, moving each item through the "what's new" section at a speed relative to that feed's post frequency.

so a feed that posts rarely would have its new items persist in the new area for a longer time.

a feed that posts 20 times a day would move its posts through the new area each day.

> it's pretty easy to put all your high volume stuff into a single category so you can mark everything read at once

I have thousands of subscriptions. I'm not going to take the time to judge and separate them. this is a job for a computer.

[jQueryIsAwesome]

I know the problem, not the solution, but maybe calculating the popularity among the people I follow on twitter (or the ones following the ones I follow in case that dataset is not big enough) to show me a lot less articles for frequent-publisher.

[sbmassey]

So are you saying that the problem is that you want everything to be in a single "river of news", but that this means that low volume feed items get lost? To me, this is more of an issue with social networking than RSS: with Reader, you can examine feeds separately if you want.

[smsm42]

IMO, that's exactly why Reader exists - structure and creating personal consumption patterns. Social networking is useless for that, it's like recommending replacing a library with a disco pub. Disco pubs are fine places, lots of fun to be had there, but recommending it as a substitute for the library is crazy. RSS/Reader is completely different use case.

[jQueryIsAwesome]

Ok, "personal consumption patterns" now means the authors I want to get updated about. A better analogy would be subscribing to see what an author publishes and subscribing to hear about what everyone is reading; sure, you get a lot of noise but is way more opening and less self-centered. And if you happen to like a lot of authors you get more focus in the ones that are more likely to be of your enjoyment because people like you are working as a quality filter.

[smsm42]

I like self-centered. I don't want to read what everyone is reading, I want to read what interests me. If I'd want to know what everyone is reading, I can subscribe to one feed of "what everyone is reading". Why would I rely on "people like me" to be a filter if I have the best option - me - and I already have these filters set up in a way that suits me? I of course do not refuse input of others - I read dozens of blogs. But I want to do it my way, not as a dump which mixes discussion on a national budget with pictures of somebody's half-eaten breakfast.